Meghzouchene Belkacem

Posted 31 January 2013 - 10:13 AM

Meghzouchene Belkacem

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72 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Aït Hamsi

That bench

Woman of the uphill paths,
I reluctantly lost your trail;
no news, no dates, no mails.
Still, that C-shaped bench,
made of concrete , bordering on
the artificial pond, reminds
me (do you?) of our talks,
gestures, fevers and woes.
Stumbling down the roads
to resume half-done plans;
still dormant in dewy revival.
Unless, we join hands again,
buds of sensuous pact
would desiccate and wilt
at the dawn of blossom.

Meghzouchene Belkacem

Posted 31 January 2013 - 10:14 AM

Meghzouchene Belkacem

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72 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Aït Hamsi

Field of shame

Day one,
khaki hat and waistcoat and breeches.
Day two,
the uniformed soldier drilled hard.
Day three,
he thought high of colors.
Day four,
he heard and wept killed mates.
Day five, he prayed by their graves.
Day six,
he fell dead, too; ambushed.
Day seven,
the brave soldier joined
his mates down in tombs.
Obviously, ants and maggots
had yet to bite and eat up
fresh bloody bodies.

Meghzouchene Belkacem

Posted 31 January 2013 - 10:15 AM

Meghzouchene Belkacem

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72 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Aït Hamsi

A nameless erased family

A destitute man got up with the lark,
his snippers still sleeping and snoring.
and his better-half, bedridden in the dark,
looked forward to the belated morning.
Frugality couldn't help bite and bark
at the smala's rustic dwelling.

The later-forties father washed face and hands,
prayed, donned his djellaba and breakfasted,
then went eke out a living on lands.
Once in his orange groves, he vomited
at the sight of strewn lifeless heads
which were hankering for being sowed.

The shocked father ran at full tilt
to save his lonely left dears.
He rushed in and missed a beat
when he saw his beheaded members
sprawling amiss on bloodied concrete.
He plunked and welled his last tears.

Meghzouchene Belkacem

Posted 31 January 2013 - 10:18 AM

Meghzouchene Belkacem

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72 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Aït Hamsi

The winged despair

I'm in a bit of a spot.
I'm feeeling hurt,
broken, and helpless.
Algeria is not suitable
to ambitious people.
Here,things are getting
even worse;
men are cashing in
on dirty bargains.
Never did I imagine
myself living on
ill-gotten money.
I' d rather be starving.
I did everything I could;
sweated away, to no purpose.
Neither my being always
ranked first did
put me on velvet.
On the contrary, I worth
nothing in their hawling
and sharkish eyes.
Even people who
had been promising me
help veered round.
I'm not holding
them any grudge,
for they were free
of behaving so.
Here in Algeria,
there is no place
for talented people.
Everybody is fed up with
the "job-for-the-boys" policies.
In spite of confusing moments,
I have been experiencing
since ages, my sleeves
are still rolled up,
challenching the overspread
wings of despair.

Lilia

Posted 31 January 2013 - 10:29 AM

You're wrong if you think that I translate from French when I'm writing! I rule out such things. I always think in English by doing so. You, students of English, are accustomed to reading books of old. You have strange feelings upon reading my book, for it’s depicting spatially and temporally our Algerian society. To carry out a novel occurring in Algeria is not walk in the park, you know. Literature is not aping others’ works. Just take novels or poems of English-speaking writers from Africa, and you’ll see that there is an African touch and voice as to texts .

Please, don't put words into my mouth. I never said you translated.. I said it 'felt like' and there's a big difference. Besides, there's no arguing that the book was indeed written in English yet, the inner voice wasn't! I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a book about Algeria, quite the contrary I like that part very much! However, it's the way a writer depicts their society, the way they infiltrate their culture into their words, the tone they use to say "I may be talking in your language, but know that it is my culture that I'm speaking of." That's what catches a reader's attention, and lure them in a novel world where they'll enjoy a virtual ride to the writer's land.

writersfreedom

Posted 31 January 2013 - 08:20 PM

@ Meghzouchene Belkacem, I like how you posted some of what you wrote. Very good idea, that's how you represent your side and show your point of view. Thank you for sharing your work with us.

@ Lilia what an interesting yet civilized argument, I love intellectual debates like this one.

~~~ Peace out ~~~

What can my enemies possibly do to me? My paradise is in my heart; wherever I go it goes with me, insepa­rable from me. For me, prison is a place of (religious) retreat; ex­ecution is my opportunity for martyrdom; and exile from my town is but a chance to travel ......

Meghzouchene Belkacem

Posted 02 February 2013 - 01:52 PM

Meghzouchene Belkacem

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72 posts

Gender:Male

Location:Aït Hamsi

Excerpts from my third book (an internatioanal thriller (mixed with spying) in the offing, it's based on my sheer fiction occuring not in Algeria this time, but in all the continents): Below you're reading just fragments, once the thriller is done, the picture will get clearer for readers. Wait me, dear readers.

THE AXIS OF APES AND PIGS

The sun betrothed to come back in ten hours, the time it needed to comb its rays on the other half of the bald globe. And without losing time, the sky above the Sinai horizon shook a celestial brush for the ritual erubescent tints following sunset. Yet, in the torch-lit cave, the clay catered for the excitement of the five young archeologists, come from five continents to dig up the find of all times. Gingerly, they remove sultry dust over the gigantic human skull. The square orbits and protuberant glabella hinted to a male. The sweat oozed out of the panting diggers.

The Australian paleo-osteologist of the team, Christopher Nocklis, let his jaws go loose, staring hypnotically at his colleagues, thunderstruck alike. He shivered at the thought of the identity of this well-preserved fossil. The circumference of the skull looked fourteen times that of an average twenty-first-century human. “Momentous!” Nocklis articulated, a dusty trowel in his right hand.

“That will shake the humankind hard, guys,” Tien-Mu Yutao said jovially. She finally carried out her real long-dreamt desire. Not in copying-ridden China, but in Egypt.

Katrin Mondschein called back the Düsseldorf’s Neander Valley, which gave the name to the stout Neanderthal man. “Darwinists have been hoaxing us by a freaky common ancestor!”

The only Egyptian curator, Ashraf Hani, knelt down at three inches from the right temporal bone. He savored the pride and hoopla Egypt would get once it was revealed to the world. Thanks God, he spoke to himself in Arabic.

Robert Fold felt the most excited of all, beyond the wavelength of his American Dream his grandmother would whisper to him back in North Dakota, when he was a playful child. “Let’s finish the excavation by removing the thick layer of dust over the whole long skeleton. My gosh! Nineteen meters. Yet the blue whale is longer with its twenty-five meters. My theory has always been: as giant creatures had existed in the past and even now, what’s wrong if also giant humans had once roved the planet? ” he lectured inside the cave.

Mondschein took a rest on a nearby flat stone. Felt her heart throbbing more than usual. Her green eyes scanned the amorphous roof of the cavern, wondering how such a huge fossil had not been excavated before. She gulped down water, as thirst got the better of her. Glad that her beauty had not distracted the three men from putting trowels on what should turn out the breakthrough of all times. She already dreamt of a research article either in Science or Nature. “Do you think,” she addressed Hani, “that the Egyptian authorities will help us get this great fossil out of here to make it known to the world?”

Hani spread his arms, yet he looked above the gargantuan skull like an ant in front of cicada, and cleared his throat before talking. “In theory, yes. This discovery is going to belittle our Pyramids. Put on exhibition in a dedicated museum in Cairo, it will bring in millions of tourists from everywhere. This will grab headlines and Breaking News. Egypt will cash in on it for sure.”

“We have a lot of work to do, my dears,” serious Nocklis said, as he was brushing layers of dust off the mandible.

Five-foot-tall Yutao took on the right clavicle of the sixty-two-foot resupine giant. This horizontal bone, if put vertically, would measure as much as her height. “Robert, it would be marvelous should all the 206 bones be conserved. It seems a miracle. No?”

Fold smiled to her and said, “Remember, Tien-Mu, some dinos’ fossils, dating back to millions of years, have been disinterred intact. And humans came millions of years after the demise of dinos”

“We’re very lucky,” Hani intervened, “to witness this paramount dug.”

Mondschein stood up and made the dust fly. She focused on the ribs. She looked a dwarf beside the skeleton. Hani paced closer, stooped to help her clear the thorax. “Perhaps we have found out our first Father,” he told her.

“Our Mother shouldn’t be afar!” Mondschein joshed.

“Count the number of ribs, Katrin!” Tien-Mu suggested. For history, back in 1543, the founder of modern human anatomy, Andries van Wesel, crucified the Church when he had demonstrated that man’s and woman’s ribs equally added up to twenty-four, against the long-held belief that man presented one rib less than a woman. The rib of contention.

Mondschein painstakingly trowelled the slop out of the thoracic cage, making the huge arcs of ribs visible. She pondered from where the water had found its way onto the skeleton.

“Some arcane miracle has preserved this skeleton,” Nocklis said, still taking measurements and reporting them in his purple scratchpad he had brought ironically from his Australian town of birth, Darwin. He walked around the skull. After all, he must crouch beside the first specimen of humankind, who gave birth to the following generations of humans. Darwin’s theory could never wash its face from this anticlockwise, party-pooper unearthing, as evolutionists were long advocating that the first guy sapiens would just measure as tall as Tien-Mu Yutao. Moreover, Darwinists assumed that the human brain had been expanding during Evolution, yet this massive brain ascertained the contrary, at first sight. ‘A nick-and-dime fossil,’ would the shielders of the Tree of Life tag the Sinai archeological uncovering.

Fold could not fight back the thought of the color of the skin of this likely first human. Black, as I am? What an elephantine psychic revamp should the First Man turn out black. He finished gauging the six-foot sternum, and then he spoke to Mondschein. “Millions of papers dedicated to show the evidence of human evolution from a common squat ancestor, will go to shatters because of what we’re exhuming. Hulk!”

Hani furrowed the torch’s light thwartwise to the emerging skeleton, moved from cranium to the right femur. The latter mensurated seventeen feet. “Even the stirrup bone of the ear will destroy the theory of human evolution, let alone this biggest femur,” he said to his busy colleagues.

“Provided the size of the skeleton, the stapes would measure one-point-three inches,” Yutao guessed and smiled. Actually, since childhood, she was all nuts about calculations. She had once given her parents the number of rice’s grains they had eaten in nine years of marriage: twenty-one million. And she guessed in her secret journal the number of sperm cells her father had gushed out before her conceiving: Two hundred billion!

Nocklis patted his neck and considered the incomputable aftermaths of the announcement of this scientific godsend. Would Australia be proud of him? He actually was an adamant evolutionist at the beginning of his career, but he soon became aware that the fossil repertoire pared down the likeliness of Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution of species from a common trunk. Worried, he said to Hani, “We need the help of Egypt to protect this skeleton from a possible scheme of concealment of the truth we’ve put our hands on.”

Hani lifted his head from the femur and stood up to face Nocklis. “Don’t worry, Chris. We’ll exhibit it at Tahrir Square, if you want!”

They all laughed, giving the cavern a cheery moment. Outside, the darkness crept on the desert, save the enlightened brains of the five endeavorers.

Eidetic Fold went on scrutinizing the giant skeleton, with the same fervor a bee tracks down the impending nectar. “Once we determine his age at the lab and decipher his genome, researchers will be astounded for sure.”

“Anyway, the religions of the three Holy Scriptures, Torah, Bible and Koran, will be boosted up by our discovery,” Hani said.

Yutao twitched her small lips, as Hani ruled out Buddhism. She would not of course dare bring about a clash of religions in a cavernous site. Yet, grudge could grow up inside her mind. She would one day spar over that. Kept on now the team spirit. No wonder that a giant human is excavated by an archeologist belonging to a giant China, she thought.

Hani scratched the red clay off the fifteen-foot tibia. The aggregate length of femur and tibia was worth a height of a two-floor house. “I don’t think we can finish work today. We must take a rest until tomorrow.”

Fold stood akimbo by the skull. “We ought to keep it a secret till we make sure that dark forces can’t erase our big discovery.” He paused a few seconds, while his colleagues were buffering a bemusement, then went on talking. “Believe me, my fellow researchers, we’re likely in danger out of our incredible find.”

Nocklis looked skeptical about their perils. He laughed and kidded, “Are we going to rest next these huge bones, really?”

Chapter 2

Little-known forty-three-year-old poet James Mindman received this first morning of March a momentous call, summoning him to travel abroad in extreme emergency to the scene of the must intervention. He did not know how much time he would be away of his Londonian house. He had awakened groggy. Washed hurriedly, donned his poet’s attire while stuffing his suitcase with needed clothes, half-breakfasted, then stepped out onto 41 Francis Road and hailed the first Heathrow-bound cab. It was raining again. Passing by the Islamic Sharia Council, Mindman mused of his non-innocence of sticking his nose also into Arabic poetry, alibiing. He was pigeonholed so by the Circus bis. Slippy A12 made the brown-bereted cabbie drive moderately.

At hectic Heathrow, a man wearing a cream three-quarter, The Sun warmed under his left armpit, stared at approaching Mindman. “Good morning, James,” he said on handshake.

Mindman just helloed him. “Are you the missing link?” he joked.

The man grinned. “Spare your poetry to rhyme your path!”

“Where I am supposed to fly right now?”

The man produced from his right pocket a flight ticket. “Cairo,” he said curtly. “There, you’ll be welcomed by a man named ZS. He’ll explain you the poem to weave at the feet of the Pyramids. The Makhad Trust is your overcoat.”

Mindman took the ticket, thanked the man, and stepped away to the registration area. It had been three years since his last touristic trip to Egypt.

The daredevil gawked at the grey back of the wannabe poet of the Circus bis.

High in the European sky, and as the Boing raped the chilly air, Mindman leafed through a book which bore the title The Curse of the Ninth. It was about virtuosos who died after composing nine symphonies. The roster was superstitiously made of Mahler, Beethoven, Bruckner, Atterberg, Dvořák, Spohr and Schnittke, to name a few. Does this fit to spooks? he thought. Anyway, his missions soared thirty. He hoped that he would cotton to his fat superiors in the Circus bis once in poetic motion in Egypt. His intrepidness made him the favorite pick for deletion duties abroad. He wondered, as he eyed a cute hostess serving tropospheric breakfast, the soul to be thrown to dustbin in the land of mummified Pharaohs. He himself found planes’ food gristly, good for chickens!

Would his target be unerasable? He retrieved from a small bag his iPhone 4S and opened the files of Arabic poetry translated to English. To cover up his missions well, he had read Arabic poets galore: Adunis, Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, al-Mutanabbi, Abu Nuwas, al-Buhturi, Salah Jeheen, Samih al-Qasim, Ahmed Shawqi, Maryan Marrash. In circa five hours of flight, he could read plenty of poems. Being created a strapper, many colleagues of Mindman would laugh at the fact he bundled up in hide of a poet!

Back at the Vauxhall Cross, Mindman was classified as a crackerjack of a spy. He had been involved in a myriad of chirurgical transcontinental tasks in Afghanistan, Pakistan Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Iran, East Timor and Venezuela. Naturally, he would be backed by corresponding lanceolate antennas of the MI6, ubiquitous like its cousin, the CIA.

The aerial minutes rolled along, and Mindman was wrapped up in the poems. He ignored the causerie next his seat between two retired Brits, a man and woman, slobbering about the sempiternity of the Pyramids. The Circus bis had trained him well, to handle his missions with utmost cottony hands, yet the heart granitic in focus.

**************************************************************

Tuscany-born, Massimo Dantello feted his sixty-sixth birthday in the cradle of his childhood: Pisa. And he always felt proud of being a Pisan, though he aged and taught library sciences at Sapienza University of Rome. The founder of library studies, Melvil Dewey, had lived eighty years. I am fourteen years away, he thought divertingly. Like all Italians. The latter loved books, too. Sono un Pisano vero, he heard his within whispering.Gli spaghetti al dente...

He had taken a taxi from Galilei Airport to Piazza San Martino. There, he came down, though his house was on nearby Via Silvestri, not far from the River Arno. What missed him most, was the Church San Martino. He strode closer, the suitcase dangling from his right hand. He felt incarnate the poor man of the low-relief of the right side of the chapel. Not that he had been adamantly religious, but it reminded him of his lost father and mother, Francesco and Carina, who would every Saturday take him to this chiesa. Inside, he ignored his heavy footsteps between the rows of palm pots and white walls, and strived to retrieve from the forgotten arcs and the altar the presence of his parents, lying buried in Camposanto...............................

By all odds, the Paris peeve rankled Inspector Luc Cascades before the kick-off of the ill-advised caucus of homosexuals in Rue Norvins. The Church values his conservative family bathed him in, since his toes had learned to walk biped, made him rue the same-sex parody of free ideals. Loth was not there to address them. Redress them. Inspector Cascades walked on this night incognito. Glanced at an aureate bakery at the right corner, and passed under a hanging lamppost. At the cross of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint-Rustique, he read LE CONSULAT, a restaurant, above which two-storied houses’ tiles and chimneys caught a glimpse of a dome of the Sacred-Heart Basilica of Montmartre. Hence the offense he felt rising up as the meeting was set to be held in this one-way street. He thanked God for his prig, because his duties did not conflict with his background.

The street seemed void of souls. Yet, Inspector Cascades saw a tall man with an orange carryall tossing a butt on the curb, before he got through a two-manned glassy door. Unbelievably, Inspector Cascades squinted, as the man put his fingers on a fingerprints’ identifier. Nothing was left to vagueness, he thought. Badges were superseded.But for Inspector Cascades, freaky sexual orientation was neither Adam-born nor Eve-embodied. Brigades of Counter-Gayness (BCG) were intent on rehabilitating lost sexual human values. Internationally coordinated, BCG sparked a hot debate in all over the world. BCG versus LGB.Would-be influential newspapers lathered on and on. Pervert politicians ducked their eroded heads.................

*************************************************************

American Darwinist Haman Capia knew well that he turned forty-seven this morning, as he trod along St. Elmo Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland. For a spring Saturday day, he bent upon buying a nosegay of flowers to his bedfast wife, Samantha. At his near left,he skimmed at Bangkok Garden, where he would, every summer jamboree,dine his Tree of Life’s arborists with Thai moo yang and shrimp massaman curry. Or sometimes, he wined his guests in the opposing scarlet-lettered Rock Bottom, if they thirsted,with Hornitos and Cointreau, to spare you enology.

Even noetic, Bethesda could not parry hying clouds. Nor could the latter become smarter by woolgathering above the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The green-topped,yellow-worded FLORIST was already selling bouquets. Inside, the fragrances waited their exquisite customers. Capia froze his plantar arches and eyed a posy of yellow sunflowers and snapdragons, beautified by myrtle and chrysanthemums.

Capia steadied himself, saw one of the staff wrapping a White & Lilies for an elderly stout woman.“Sure. My wife will appreciate,” he said with his clear-cut voice. “I take it.”

“All right. I get it ready for you in a jiffy.”

..................................

********************************************************************

While unaided macilent children were starving to death in far Somalia, top model Carla Venizzia enjoyed her anorexic twenties near Rome. She could afford all kinds of food, yet she should follow a strict diet for catching up in Vogue, Elle, Amica, and Gioia, to name a few.Venizzia had the perfect profile for the job: genuine blonde, blue-eyed, 1.82 meter tall,86-cm-chested, 61-cm-waisted, 90-hipped and, above all gorgeously killing to bozos. And a coveted prey to prying paparazzi.

As upshot of her piled up wealth from posing in bikinied magazines, she had bought a two-million-euro deluxe villa in the village of Formello. A real jewel with its coiled swimming pool and lofty trees, providing eastern views to Apennine Mountains, western panoramas to the sea and southern gazes to Rome....................

***************************************************************

Granada, Spain.

The spring sky was tinctured Mediterranean.The flamenco was played near the Fuente de las Batallas, hardly drowned by the burbles of this fountain. Heptogenary Cristobal Goceros pulled out his red Citröen C5 at Puerta Real’s underground park at 9A.M.Within six minutes, he would be meeting at four-star restaurant Victoria an important man.Goceros was somehow astir of the discovery he would be divulging to him. That would change a long-established dogma. Yet, he knew well dogmas were always doomed to dismantlement. He could not believe his goggled eyes that Alhambra was holding the hidden secret of life.A secret he was nursing in his brains. .........................

***********************************************************

Recife, Brazil.

The appearance of eighteen-year-old Verônica Otávio wowed the lecherous men with their tuxedos at Sampa Night Club. They had visible reason. She was wearing a light magenta bikini, long black hair massaging her bare shoulders down on the G-stringed round nates. And her beauty, stressed by the generous breasts, was typically Brazilian, a skin so hazed by the sun at the beach of Boa Viagem. The dudes’ profiles would shock the masses in all over the nose-dozing world of fake values................

***********************************************************

His buttocks covered by a white cloth, Zakarya Solal sighed as he was lying flat on the wooden massage table. The soft fingers of the eighteen-year-old masseuse, Isaline Benyona, made his member turgescent under the towel. No man could feign frostiness when a cute woman kneads your muscles erotically. The gap of eleven years melted away amidst tsunamis of testosterones..............................

***********************************************************

Through Google Earth, the Sinai Peninsula looked like an earthen clitoris. But for fifty-eight-old tourism ghoul Hosny Bih, the resorts he owned sucked in year-round the whole carnal groins of the world. The Egyptian revolt had not ousted him out of lucrative businesses. Well-hidden, he at last popped his disproportionate head out of the smoke of guns. He had even backed revolutionaries by money to make believe he was a fervent detractor of former President Hosni Mubarak. Yet, he knew he had been an accomplice of the tots of the fallen modern Pharaoh.......................

***********************************************************

Shina Kinoshita grew up in Higashi-ku, Hiroshima. Learned there, eking out her living as a respected writer. At thirty-nine, she felt proud of her six novels, all dealing with families’ sequels of nuked Hiroshima, back on 6 August 1945, by the Yankees. She bore no grudge to the US, yet the damage had been misdone. Her last novel, ‘The oleander overcomes the Little Boy,’ enchanted Japanese readers yet it salted their bygone injuries of past. The local daily, Chugoku Shimbun, got her some blurbs about her writing, as the newspaper stressed that her grandparents had been victims of the nuclear bombing of that inhuman Monday Japanese had never forgotten. Written in their irradiated genes...................

Beebo

Posted 02 February 2013 - 06:48 PM

I just want to say that it's a great pleasure to see you on our forums replying to our member's critique. Please rest assured that our forums are not your "typical" Algerian forum where we sit here and talk about others due to the fact that we're "jealous" or because of "hatred" towards others and each other.

Everyone here is entitled to their own opinion, doesn't mean everyone is always right, but that's why we have these debates. We try to give our point of view while at the same time taking in others' point of views and opinions. There is no room for the hatred, jealousy and حسد that's just backwards thinking that leads to no good for anyone.

I appreciate that you took the time to share more of your writing pieces. I assure you that we're proud of your work and efforts in representing Algeria with your work, I just ask that you don't take anything personal.

Abu Daoud

Posted 04 February 2013 - 04:43 AM

Abu Daoud

Members

164 posts

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Location:Madinah, Saudi Arabia

Well Belkacem, you sure can churn out the words. I still see your syntax as abnormal but, hey, that's what English is about. It's made up from over 100 other languages, it is now an international language and this gives licence to do whatever you want with it. Have fun. I am a revert to Islam though and I wanted to leave the erotica behind me when I came to Muslim countries.

Apocalypse and •eve• like this

“Whoever recommends and helps a good cause becomes a partner therein, and whoever recommends and helps an evil cause shares in its burdens” Qur’an:4:85

So if a member wishes to use a "nickname" then that's okay and if another wishes to use his "real name" then that's also okay. To each their own. As long as E-DZ rules are not broken, members are free to express themselves as they like.

Apocalypse

Posted 04 February 2013 - 04:21 PM

I have had the honour of receiving a nicely written angry arrogant yet elegant electronic letter from M. Blekacem Mezghouchen.

Let me first sir, tell you that we're happy to have you in our forums, I finally managed to bring you to the forum although I lost your Facebook contact. I'd say that it is a pleasure for us to have an Academic among us, none of us here, as far as I know, has written any books or lectured on masses of respected high officials and Academics. Welcome

Apparently, in my short rapid written comment about the novel Sophia in the White City I had forgotten to mention the qualities of our respected writer. I have to admit that the man has a scientific background but a very good use of Enlglish language. Yes sir, better than mine and I am an English language Grad from the University of Tlemcen. I believe I have mentioned in my comment that I loved the city of Algiers via the novel, but to talk shortly, and I do not call myself a literary critic, I have a hard time in learning criticism, your novel is NOT (sorry I just realised I forgot to mention that tiny important word) a novel which fits into contemporary criticism. If you recheck my ancient comments, the first one I have made about the novel was "thank you snow white you have saved me". I had the intention of studying the novel and write my dissertation about it and proudly show up with a first academic work about a first English Algerian novel in a neighbouring country. You cannot call me jealous sir, because I was ambitious to work on it. Yet, I sent the novel to my methodology teacher who is Professor in Literary Theory field, he gave me no response at all and whenever I spoke of the novel he changed the subject.

My comments, whether you like them or not, represent only me. If you, sir, are accustomed to receive praise from your friends who end up writing nicely polished reviews of the novel you must learn to accept criticism, at least to avoid making few mistakes next time. Nobody is devoid of making mistakes, no one is perfect except God, not even me and not even you Mr.Mezghouchen.

I have to say, one more time, that your English is very good sir, I know about creative writing, I know about a useful novel and a novel to entertain oneself and a journal. I would like you to accept my remarks sir, though pleasingness, but Sophia in the White City is a personal novel. I like the idea of The Ankle of Tinhinan, you say it deals with the experience of suicide. I think that is interesting.

What I try to say in few words is, be the man you talk about in Sophia in the White city.

Few years ago I had the idea of telling someone here that he was always too angry with Algeria and was always criticizing and never said a good thing, I had the right to a long nicely written response which later made me blush and delete my comments.

I have never written a novel sir, nor a short story. I had the chance to write three or four essays and I am not satisfied with the way they are written but, since you consider English talking people's praising a good thing, I was praised for these essays by one American Professor and one Scottish teacher and many Arab Professors. (What I mean is, just because they said my work was good does not necessarily make it good, I can evaluate myself)

Do you want people to say what an astonishing work you've written for a first novel? With all my respect sir, I do respect you for having taking the chance and having written a good novel, but it is not what you want it to be. I'd be a liar. Otherwise how come you did not earn the Nobel prize for it?

Sir, Kurt Vonnegut as an example, since I ended up working on his novels, is considered the father of black Humor in USA and a social scientist and a genius, yet he never earned the Nobel prize and his first novels were deemed useless and unsuccessful. His Master's thesis called "Fluctuations between Good and Evil" in Anthropology was rejected, but his third novel, Cat's Cradle was both considered a chef d'oeuvre and he was granted his Masters degree for it. The had a family of six children in charge and he had to feed them from writing only, he wrote Postmodernism and Science fiction in his native language in late 1950s and early 1960s and it was until 1969 that he became famous. You sir, are writing Realism in 2008 or 2009.

Finally, regarding my identity, that is something personal one does not just reveal their identity on Internet!! But I promise you sir, that I will contact you and meet you and tell you what I really think of the novel and I will make sure to read all your works.
And, did you say Cowardice? No Comment...

Ps: Say Hello to Uncle Sam when he visits you in Mostaganem.

PPs: I do not call myself successful, I have been trying to write a dissertation since June 2011 an I have not finished yet, and I am aware of how bad my English is.

PPPs: I am once more deceived by your close minded reaction, for someone as important as your claim yourself to be.

PPPPs: I do not hate you, and "Algerian morale and awkward way of thinking out things." is not my way although I do not count myself better or different, I had the chance and the curse of growing up in the same society which made you so violent towards other people's criticism.

Copy of the elegant email I have received from Lord Mezghouchen of Mostaganem:

I do think that the status of anonymousness you endorsed is sheer cowardice. Ideas and theories and critics should be put forward, and sustained, by identified authors, if any. Have the boldness to reveal your identities first before you let you jealous tongues creep out of your ridiculous lips. I dare all forum posters to conjure up an English novel. You cannot claim to be in the corridors of literary critics without weaving at least a clever short-story, short of a novel! You’re chasing your own tail by disparaging me so vehemently.
One post claimed wrongly that my novel “is barren in terms of idioms” and that I don’t have “a grasp on English expressions.”You should be aware that a creative writer must labor and tinker the words to churn out innovative expressions and metaphors, not just parroting existing idioms. Yet my novel included dozens of idioms. Getting to grips with idioms isn’t the gist of talented writer.
I let you know that more respected academics in UK praised my writings when we met back in December 2009 in Rabat, Morocco, in a workshop on creative English writing in the Maghreb, organized and chaired by the British Council. My mates Ayoub Boukhatem (lecturer at the University of Blida) and Ihcen Gasmi (a news speaker at private-run Numidia News), who were among the gatherers in the Rabat workshop, have been encouraging me since then, even paying tribute to my trailblazing writings, though I’m not an English grad by training.
Borrowing from one’s experience and autobiography for a first novel is by no means a shame. I understand why you play down my writings: it pertains to Algerian morale and awkward way of thinking out things.
I’m rubbing salt in your wounds of jealousy by announcing you this: I finished my second English novel dealing with suicides (on the track of a mysterious suicide of a young Algerian woman in August 2004), entitled: THE ANKLET OF TINHINAN
To give you the kiss of life: I’m working on a third novel: THE AXIS OF APES AND PIGS.
Last but not least, I invite you, dear posters, to soften you hatred-fed critics. Fake critics, as a matter of fact.
It’s up to you now. Hurt your keyboards!
PS: by the way, US Ambassador to Algiers, His Excellency Ensher, is willing to meet me here in Mostaganem, Feb. 6, 2013!
Belkacem Meghzouchene